A whole new batch of character posters featuring the Avengers logo over the characters in action-poses have been released for the upcoming Marvel flick and we’ve got them all here for you! Plus, Joss Whedon, writer and director of The Avengers, recently sat down with Yahoo Movies for an in-depth interview talking all-things Avengers and we’ve got the highlights!

Joss Whedon, professional fanboy and Avengers lead, had a lot to say in his recent interview with Yahoo! One of the biggest topics in the interview was how the crew transitioned Tony Stark from the character we see in Iron Man to the character we now see in The Avengers:

“I think the conversations were largely about ‘Where is Tony now?’ Like, ‘Who is he now? Where is he [going]from Iron Man 2 toward Iron Man 3?’ He is such a well-delineated character, so it was really a question of, ‘What do we want to stress and what do we want to say? We have said that, we have done that, so let’s not go there.’

“He felt a sort of isolated man who is — even though there is an element of that, just because that’s sort of what any team movie is about. He didn’t want to be the sort of just, ‘I am totally wrapped up in one thing and I am not thinking about everybody else.’ He didn’t want to be the tortured lonely man, which I totally get. And it was easy to make him as delightful and gregarious as he can be and still go, well, there is a piece missing and it’s the piece that makes him an Avenger.”

Another character improvement from their first appearance was that of Nick Fury, whose lead role in the Avengers was built off of a brief after-credits cameo appearance at the end of Iron Man. How did that work out?

“Well, he is not going to be talking about his childhood, and you do want to keep a certain mystery. Also — and this is something that I was very pleased that Marvel actually mandated — they were very interested in keeping him, not just in the sort of a mystery of how the organization operates, but a real moral gray area where you really have to decide, ‘Is Nick Fury the most manipulative guy in the world? Is he a good guy? Is he completely Machiavellian or is it a bit of both?’ And that was really fun to tweak.

“I felt that in the other movies, they had been cameos and he had been called upon to come in and be Sam Jackson and bluster a little bit. And I told Sam upfront that my big agenda was to see the weight on someone who is supposed to be in control of the most powerful beings on the planet. The weight on somebody who has to run the organization and the gravity of it. Not that we don’t have any fun with Nick, but he definitely — it’s, I feel like a much more textured performance and at times really moving.”

We’ve seen several Hulk reboots over the past few years and The Avengers brings another. How was the process of adapting the Hulk for yet another new actor?

“Yeah, he and I did the most character work of anyone, because we really were starting fresh, but we were starting with something that had been embodied several times. And both of us agreed upfront that the template for who we wanted this guy to be in his life was Bill Bixby, the TV [show character]who was busy helping other people. That was more interesting to us than the Banner in the first two movies who was always fixated on curing himself. We spent a lot of time talking about what makes us Hulk out, the nature of anger, how it feels.

“We even fought some. I mean literally we actually got some pads out and did some tussling. Just to talk about the physicality, and also the physicality of somebody who has to control this thing, and the way he moves in space and the way he relates to the people and the objects around him. It was extremely fun. What we found was that he could be very bumbling and kind of awkward, but at the same time very graceful and in this almost transcendent control of himself.”

About Author

Mike Macauley is the founder and editor in chief of Lytherus.com. He also founded and runs Shurtugal.com, the official Inheritance Cycle community, and published his book, The Inheritance Almanac, in 2011. Mike can be found on Twitter at @mikemacauley.